“Birdwatching on Mount Utsayantha, New York”
We had not expected to see
a yeti at the top of the fire tower,
peering over the railing
at the gray December valley
while we watched it through our binoculars.
We had been hoping to find a lifer, a misdirected
swallow-tailed kite that had hit
Florida and then continued north
until it was surrounded by pine, maple,
and the absolute absence of its own kind.
A maladjustment in its migratory systems
had landed the bird on the same mountain
as this yeti at the top of the tower.
The yeti whose eyes shone in our lenses
like the wide, wet black of a lowland gorilla,
blinking and blinking
in the sun of an unknown world.
We hypothesized for a moment
that the yeti and bird had traveled
here, intentionally: a planned rendezvous.
It seemed easier to imagine this,
as we scanned the trees for the errant kite,
than to think the bird was hopeless and lost
and the yeti had always been here,
our very own Abominable Snowman,
and was noticeable only now
when, like so many other things,
we had lost the ability for true winter.
An earlier version of this poem appeared in the fall 2021 issue of Prospectus: A Literary Offering.